poems by rachel kellum
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Matters of Little Consequence
Today I am mostly
in the business of tending
matters of little consequence.
If I don’t eat lunch,
I’ll be empty hungry
by supper.
If I don’t write, I’ll pad
through the cool blind house,
or the red stone garden, studying
cracks and pink and green light.
If I don’t play with my boys,
they’ll find their friends and scheme
inside the giant alley lilac carved out
yesterday with dull garden shears
they lost and found at dusk. Their fort.
If I don’t help my daughter,
she will whine until sidewalk weeds
are all whacked, missing her thick book.
If we don’t talk, there will be silence.
If I don’t look at the clock,
the noon horn will still blow
a siren to the town: the day is bright!
But I will. I will eat honey toast and write,
I’ll sit near yarrow and wonder about dry roots.
I’ll laugh with my browned boys unless they cry,
and they often do. I will answer my daughter
when she calls, “Mom?” and hug her for
widening our walk just because it needed done,
even though I didn’t ask. Just once, I’ll look
at the kitchen clock. Alone, we will be
quiet, let summer work its sun
and shade across the unimportant
moonless day.
2011
Three and Sixty-Six Years Ago: A Lost Coin
She says, ‘But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.’
In a darkening corner of the garden not turned
Or planted since the summer he tilled
By hand his own packed hurt, pausing to stare
After my leaving for another weekend—
I could not not go, I’m sorry, all, to admit,
To disillusion those who wished I were more,
We all were more than clods crumbling apart
Riddled with small roots waiting to dart—
I found a small silver coin.
I rubbed it,
Obviously not an ordinary dime. So thin,
What a strange head! Hurried to transplant
The Roma tomatoes before nightfall and
Mosquitos, I pocketed it.
Next morning,
Dressed to plant peppers in last night’s jeans
I remembered. There, so tiny: 1945,
And a head with wings!
The back: a bundle, an axe and olive branch.
Misnamed a Mercury dime by Moderns
Who of course loved the god
Of tricky messages, but no,
It was meant to be Winged Liberty,
A free thinker,
And it was no man,
But a woman, Elsie Kachel Stevens,
Wife of Wallace, beloved Modern
Poet.
At once I wondered
Is she the woman
By the sea who sang
The world into order? Who wondered
About paradise in her peignoir
Eating orange slices
Near the green cockatoo?
I could see her
Sitting very still
For Adolf, the sculptor in their building
Who noticed her
Cheekbones and winged hair,
Searching her lines for the portrait bust—
A model for the coin— with careful hands
In clay and perhaps upon her own neck and face
Making material match material.
I understand how worlds are made.
Adolf gave her the bust.
After her husband’s death,
She tried to let it go.
Her daughter refused to take it
For her mother seemed so fond of it.
No one knows where it is now.
Pawnshop? Attic?
Bottom of the Hudson River
Where she once stood pondering
Him and a blue heron flew?
It is lost,
But her winged head
Was in my garden, thin soft silver
Gashed twice by my own hungry shovel.
Tomatoes send quiet roots
Into soil that once held her.
The new garden holds me, alone,
Sitting quietly in the morning,
Eyes woven green with gentle windy leaves.
Overhead, on a wire, a pigeon sings.
From Our Basement
I couldn’t stop piling
musty pillows, broken toys,
empty cardboard boxes waiting three years
to move me out of the house
where my marriage ended.
I’m still here.
This pile for donation:
jeans outgrown by widening hips and lengthened
legs, toys for babies, colorful under dust,
the light fixture we replaced, the rack
we hung our coats upon for years.
This pile for a friend:
a bag of small clothes and little dolls,
my mother’s fine table that lost a chair
all those years ago, thrown
in anger by her second husband,
and my second husband’s grandmother’s
once pristine solid dark wood table
whose chairs cracked by
leaning back too much, surface scarred
by careless forks and wayward fire.
This pile to recycle:
the boxes, broken down flat.
This pile for the earth:
anything peed upon by proud cats
or sleeping toddlers, moldy rugs and concrete dust
destroyed by basement water, clothes broken open
by busy knees, toys by small boys’ hands, and
tiny plastic parts that lost their large plastic families.
I’m done collecting junk,
holding onto dust.
I returned it to itself.
You know how it goes,
the saying.
My daughter and I hauled pile four
in three
truckloads to the landfill where
expressionless glancing men shoveled
rancid trash onto a stained conveyor belt.
Two times in the white truck we backed in
and tossed our junk on the rank concrete.
Throw it away, most of us say.
You may have heard there is no away,
and they, of course, are right,
but that the earth
would open its mouth
and swallow
what is broken, useless and stinking in my life
healed me, even as I cringed
at my own shameful waste.
I half expected the attendant to shake her head, click
her tongue, but this is Morgan County, and I’m Green.
No one cared but me. They took my money. Six bucks
a load to unload more than they could ever bury.
The third load skipped the conveyor
and went straight to the earth:
the peeling old front door (what did we save it for?)
the bent aluminum swing set
the futon we made love on,
that our kids
napped and peed on in trusted, diaperless sleep,
that I leaned upon to push our second son
in a great thrust of inner wind
into a dry world from inside
my wet and bleeding one,
that held you in the basement
when we began to separate
That futon was so bright there at the foot
of the pile, the most beautiful of trash,
hunched over in accidental sorrow
like the woman I saw thrown from her car,
breast hanging out the bottom of her disheveled shirt,
unmoving. I prayed someone would come
rescue her because I couldn’t stop,
already late for the airport.
She was dead on arrival.
Nobody saved her.
Now, at the landfill, I hoped
the men to our left tossing
roof shingles one by one by hand
from a low trailer would see the futon
in its red, black and tan
southwest glory
and save it, take it home,
kiss their wives upon it.
They were too busy.
I watched it, a bright memory
folded in on itself in the rearview mirror
and drove over the scale
lighter, on time.
2011
Graduation Day
for Jose, whose afro could never be contained by such a small cap
The wind
doesn’t care
about graduation
or ceremony.
It celebrates beginnings
by ripping music
off stands,
flipping modest women’s
flowery skirts,
lock by lock freeing
hair from clips and careful
spray, throwing
mortarboards
upon the earth.
Go ahead, pray—
but it is wind
that blows our kids
into the world.
2011
Where you are
While you walk in another land—
where Besh o droM concerts are missed for taxes
and young men cancel their own birthday celebrations,
and tired aunts scold and bite after American sons
who leave old mothers dreaming of red fields and
dead fathers drinking, and grandmothers have removed
black scarves from their white heads to lie down to die—
you also walk around in my body.
Last night we met in my office head,
filled with white bed. I rearranged the gauze
curtains, hiding from shadows with papers.
Your Chakrasamvara teeth shone in the blue light,
waiting. In the corner of the alley attached,
a tall doll—Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince—
leaned, left behind by a retired colleague.
I saved him because I know what he means.
I also find you in this house where I’ve been
painting two worn rooms. Dreary antique whites
and greys slowly turning icy waterfall and
Tibetan white. I am tired of paint, of tedious blue tape.
So, I call you into the rooms, eating your apricot
spread on toast, or brushing your teeth.
Then I am brushing crisp skies to hold you,
to hold everything we will swallow and lose.
Thankfully, this morning, there you were
in my friend’s poem. My heart was not wrapped
in New Mexican corn but Hungarian head scarves,
smelling of our sex and breakfast, cottonwood
seed shells staining the bottoms of our bare feet.
I picked yours off with my teeth. The revolution
of red is always quietly here. Right here on the small
planet of our bed. It has to start somewhere.
2011
~With thanks to Stewart Warren’s “She Asks for a Poem”
thunderheads
i sat in the mercury café
(funny, at first i typed cage)
and it was full
of the cool people.
too many of them. none mine.
as my gps led me out of the congested city,
the interesting knot untied and dissolved.
clouds ate the frayed ends.
we were doing what hicks do, wit said,
watching dumb
as
clouds roll by
2011
To every one I tried to eat, I’m sorry
I have chased mountains
and quiet men, wolf women
and booky teachers:
Help me!
I’ve been every mother,
frowned
and stomped for silence
hoping it would
point.
Even so,
my throat’s
been
so thin nothing
could pass, my abdomen
immense
globe of hunger stretched
around boundless
ache.
Wandering ghost belly
No woodsy cabin or bear man
fed. No singing or dying
woman,
witch or nun could satisfy
with wands or words
or all the grief
I could eat.
I had it wrong.
Only when in uncalled dream
I found one hovering just above
no within
no as
(me) unadorned,
clear as ringing
goblet
casting
prism mandorlas
did lost paths merge.
My belly turned inside
outward,
swallowed me
along with the spinning
world
and everything
was perfect, of one
taste.
It fades, this flexibility.
Sometimes I walk
around allowing all
passage,
my human throat and belly
a ruse for the fact
that the path to this
much space was
never any
where or who
but here.
2011
song of a once sprinter
these legs remember fast
twitch, long gait, quick
thigh, piston yes,
toes earth,
heart sky, wide
gathering short burst,
arms reaching through
soulmade wind, hands
tunneling loose to
what is always up
ahead: unfillable
space burning
blue, my speed
just beyond
my teeth,
waiting
with no
string
but
joy
2009